As the service providers for high-speed data and video services continue to migrate and converge their networks, they are rapidly approaching a time where they may be delivering data to many different types of customer premise equipment (CPE) devices inside subscriber homes. As an example, cable providers may soon have subscribers in a single neighborhood with a wide array of different types of legacy and newly-deployed CPE devices, including DOCSIS 1.x cable modems (“CM”)s, DOCSIS 2.0 CMs, DOCSIS 3.0 CMs, legacy MPEG2 set top boxes (“STB”)s, legacy MPEG2/MPEG4 STBs, and MPEG2/MPEG4 IP STBs (behind various types of CMs). In addition, service providers are also approaching a time where the sources of their video content may be coming from many different locations, including walled-garden, operator-managed video servers, third-party content providers on the Internet with contractual partnerships with the operator, and third-party content providers on the Internet without contractual partnerships with the operator.
As a result of these various mixes of traffic sources and traffic sinks, the operators would typically require a large array of products to efficiently deliver all of these different high-speed data and video data streams to their subscribers in the future. In addition, another large array of boxes may be required to perform secondary processing functions (ex: trans-rating, trans-coding, encryption, etc.) on these packet streams.